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Book Reviewed by:On October 7, 2023, in response to Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories and increasing aggression on the part of the Israeli military, armed groups led by Hamas's military wing launched a surprise attack on Israeli territory near the Gaza Strip, killing nearly twelve hundred Israeli citizens and taking others hostage. Three weeks later, after Israel had more than countered the attack with an all-out bombardment, bordering on obliteration, of military and civilian sites in Gaza, journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad posted on X (formerly Twitter): "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."
Sadly, more than a year later, the outcome of this brutal conflict—not to mention the future of Gaza and its people (more than 45,000 of whom were killed before a ceasefire was declared in January 2025)—is far from certain. And El Akkad has had more than enough material to write not just a single social media post but an entire book about what has been, in his devastatingly well-reasoned argument, the West's—more specifically, Western liberals'—utter moral failure to speak out against a military response so disproportionate that it's become ethically indefensible. El Akkad describes not only former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley writing messages ("Finish them!") on the side of US–funded bombs, but the equally damning incoherence of leading Democrats: "There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher...It is a reminder that, in times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name onto the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it."
As El Akkad recounts throughout his short but powerful book, Americans, Europeans, and others have developed convoluted narratives that condone, or at least ignore, the horrors not only inflicted on Palestinian journalists, aid workers, hospital personnel, and thousands of children, but countless others who lack political power and privilege, from immigrants to political detainees. In the West, El Akkad suggests, we've grown too accustomed to our relative privilege, to the trappings of comfort—but this compels us to deny at what cost that comfort comes: "It's almost refreshing...when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of Western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary...It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you'll never meet simply have to die."
El Akkad places a large part of the blame not only on politicians, but also on the press, a world he knows well. His book is a hybrid memoir of sorts, and it incorporates his personal story of being born in Egypt, growing up in Qatar, and moving as a teenager to Canada, where he began writing for his college newspaper shortly after 9/11, later covering a variety of international stories for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He despairs at what his profession has become, the "tortured, spineless" way in which newspaper headlines characterize acts of war (an example from The Guardian: "Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect's Home"). The journalist's job, El Akkad argues, is "to agitate against silence," but too often these days, Western journalists, paralyzed by the need for "self-erasing neutrality," resort to "a flattened mode, listing claim and counterclaim, measuring the impact on the poll numbers. Everything becomes a horse race."
It's not just about politicians and the press, however—it's also about everyday citizens being afraid, or unwilling, to risk their own comfort by speaking up, speaking out, or even opting out of the contradictions in which they find themselves. El Akkad points out the absurdity of a system in which more ire is directed toward student protestors than the powerful figures whose acts they are protesting.
Almost no one who holds any kind of relative privilege or agency escapes El Akkad's condemnation, which means, of course, that virtually anyone who picks up his book will encounter moments—probably more than a few—of self-recognition and the resultant profound discomfort that accompanies it. But that discomfort is exactly what El Akkad is urging readers to reckon with—and in the book's closing sections, he offers much-needed advice for how those facing this kind of self-reckoning can make different choices. He provides models for both active resistance (protesting, speaking out, making change locally) and negative resistance—"refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one's moral threshold."
He suggests that truly standing up for justice might begin by people making small sacrifices: perhaps boycotting companies who profit from Israel's aggressions, urging the institutions with which they're affiliated (including state and local governments) to divest from Israel, or—in the case of his fellow writers and creatives—"having the guts to use their acceptance speeches to call for an end to the genocide." These modest actions, El Akkad suggests, might further strengthen our resolve to stand up in larger, more significant ways, before "it's too late to hold anyone accountable."
This review
first ran in the February 26, 2025
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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